It’s a spring evening, and the Miller Theater in Center City, Philadelphia, is bursting with an excited crowd. Patrons serpentine the lobby waiting to buy pre-signed books by the British author Neil Gaiman. Gaiman, whom Stephen King once heralded as a “treasure-house of story,” had to stop live signings because readers would queue several city blocks outside his events. During his final signing tour in 2013, as he inked his name and personal notes in thousands of books, Gaiman took to plunging his aching arm in a bucket of ice on the advice of a physical therapist.
Tonight’s event has been billed as “An Evening With Neil Gaiman,” and it’s a reschedule from 2020, after a plot twist worthy of one of his stories shuttered the world. Gaiman often writes about the macabre — the coming apocalypse, journeys to Hell, life in a graveyard, campfire-quality horror — and yet his work carries a compassionate generosity, a dark humor that revels in the exquisite muddle that is a human life. His characters are frequently normal people bumping up against the fantastical, where they must contend with witches and gods — or, as in the novel “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch” (1990), which he co-wrote with the late British author Terry Pratchett, an angel and a demon who have followed humanity since the time of the poisoned apple and have forged an unlikely friendship and a love of us mortals.
“Neil breaks life down to the fundamentals of what it is that makes us human,” the actor Jon Hamm tells me. Hamm started reading Gaiman’s novels, including “Good Omens,” around the time he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and now he plays a role in the Amazon Studios and BBC Studios series based on the book. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) “It’s not about what makes us American, or what makes us Black or White or any of the labels that we’ve established for ourselves over the course of however many millennia we’ve been here, but what it is that connects us.”
Entire families, some three generations deep, are here to see Gaiman tonight, and what they buy reflects his genre-busting reach. There are board books for children; novels, like “American Gods” (2001), which showcases Gaiman’s capacity to blend fantasy, folklore and myth; and multiple collections of short stories and essays. And then there are the dictionary-size volumes of “The Sandman,” the series that arguably put Gaiman on the map. Published by DC Comics between 1989 and 1996, the 76 issues of “The Sandman,” which many critics agree helped usher in the golden age of the contemporary graphic novel, tell the story of Morpheus, King of the Dreaming, and his godlike siblings who include Death and Destiny. In the sprawling tale, Morpheus struggles to regain control of his Dream world after being captured by humans dabbling in the occult.
“The Sandman” was a revelation when it came out, according to the comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, who met Gaiman in the 1990s when he was one of the many fans waiting in a long signing line. Oswalt had first read “The Sandman” in college. “I could not believe how amazing it was,” he says, because “it contained universes. I had never seen that done in a comic so perfectly.”
And yet, for the better part of Gaiman’s career, only a few of his novels and short stories made it to screens, notably “Stardust” and “Coraline.” Many of his most formative books and graphic novels proved difficult to translate. Gaiman used, as his storytelling framework for “The Sandman,” the entirety of history, bringing in figures from Norse gods and Lucifer to Shakespeare and Mark Twain. He also creates characters that are rarely simple binaries of good or evil, reflecting the baffling complexity of human nature.
“All of the things that made ‘Sandman’ wonderful were the same things that made it almost impossible to adapt for film and television for 30 years,” says David S. Goyer, a filmmaker and producer who was a co-writer on the “Dark Knight” Batman trilogy. “All of the features that we love about ‘Sandman’ — that it is, in essence, a story about stories — are the bugs that stymied Hollywood.”
Today that is no longer the case. Quietly and steadily over the past six years, Gaiman has matched some of the most prolific creators in Hollywood. And after 32 years trapped in the purgatory of Hollywood development, a 10-episode series based on “The Sandman” will premiere on Netflix on Aug. 5. Developed by Gaiman, Goyer and writer Allan Heinberg, it represents one of the streaming service’s biggest-budget original productions. Meanwhile, Gaiman’s 2005 novel “Anansi Boys,” a modern twist on the ancient stories of the West African trickster god Anansi, is now an Amazon Studios series in postproduction, and “Good Omens” recently wrapped filming its second season. These follow on the heels of the series“American Gods,” which premiered in 2017 on Starz — earning two Emmy nominations for its first season — and aired its third season last year.
In total, Gaiman has seven shows that he has developed or that are based on his writing, with more in the works. He has become the great adapter, pulling from the store of fable and myth for his books, and transmogrifying his written work into radio and stage plays, audiobooks and movies. And now television.
Gaiman’s books “couldn’t get made in a three-network landscape,” Hamm says, owing to their complexity. As television has matured, though, so too have the opportunities to tell more-nuanced stories. Shows like “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” have seasoned audiences with their myriad storylines and morally ambiguous characters, while the maturation of streaming services has allowed more niche stories to exist. This confluence of online viewing and marketplace readiness has led to a watershed moment for the adaptation of Gaiman’s work. And the timing is ripe: In an era when public discourse so rarely reflects the complicated truth of our existence — when politics and punditry seem hellbent on reductionism and division — Neil Gaiman’s intricacies may be exactly what we need.
